Congratulations to Danny and the
El Dorado County Weather in Placerville, California
for your selection as
WXForum.net’s Featured Weather Web Site for Spring, 2010! 
Danny's website went live in June of 2006. His station is powered by a Wireless Davis Vantage Pro2 Plus with 24-Hr Fan-Aspirated Radiation Shield #6163. He really liked how reliable and accurate it was for others.
He started out using VWS and added VWS flash a shortly after. A year later he went live with Weather Display Software. Other software used in the site are HAMweather software, Nexstorm for his Boltek Lightning Detector along with a GPS unit, Skymet for some of his mesomaps, GRLevel3 for his radar and Axis Internet Camera software for his Axis megapixel webcam.
Danny would like to add a cloud sensor and satellite receiver for Polar Orbiting Satellites.
His website is all hand coded using a very powerful linux based text editor named "gEdit", a file manager named Thunar, and FileZilla for uploading.
Danny's motivation behind having his site on-line was that he gets a lot of enjoyment working on my weather site. He says, "It's a labor of love. I work on my site any chance I get."
Initially, several websites inspired him with the content of the weather data they offered and how they displayed it. They were the 12 or so
sites that used to be featured on the Ambient Weather site but he can't remember their names.
His future plans are to continue trying to improve his site's look/feel, content, functionality, world-reach, traffic and monthly income.
Danny currently sends data to Weather Underground, CWOP, Awekas, PWS/HAM, and Anything Weather.
He muses, "Sometimes I wonder why I bother sending data to all of these places, but I suppose I continue doing it for web site exposure."
Danny has been been extremely interested in the weather for "as long as I can remember. I think maybe growing up in Southern California had a lot to do with. It made me a bit starved to see any weather happen at all."
"It has been most rewarding being able to provide the weather every day to so many different people around the world."
His advice to someone wanting to get started in weather watching as a hobby is to "learn all the different cloud types and the dynamics of a thunderstorm first so they can know exactly what they are looking at when observing the sky."
His advice to someone wanting to either start a new weather web site or improve the one they already have is to "first learn HTML and CSS! It's easy to learn and will make the experience so much more enjoyable for them instead of a struggle."
Danny is 56 and retired. He's been married for 37 years and has 3 children. Two no longer live at home and his youngest unfortunately passed away 5 years ago. He is a huge animal lover. He and his wife have 4 Scotties with mom, dad and their 2 female offspring. It's one big happy Scotty family. They also have 3 cats.
Danny was a retail business owner and after 20 years he finally sold the business.
His long standing interests have been:
1. All Things Computer
2. Programming,
3. Building From Scratch, Maintaining and Running his own three Linux Operating Systems (ie Gentoo Linux)
4. All Things Weather
5. Web Site Design
Danny says, "I would like the thank Dacula Weather for nominating my site and all those thattook the time to vote for it. I am very honored to have actually won. It was not expected. I would also like to highly compliment the weather sites in the running with me.
They have all done such extraordinary jobs on their own web sites and my hat goes off to each of them.
I would also like to thank Ken True for all the hard work he does for this forum and elsewhere. I honestly don't know how he does everything he does, much of which we never even see or know about. Thanks so much Ken!" [ed. note:
]
Congratulations, Danny and your
El Dorado County Weather website, for being selected by your peers as WXForum.net’s Featured Weather Web Site for Spring, 2010!
Congratulations also, to all our outstanding nominees -- your efforts have not gone unnoticed!
